Andrés

Shanker Singham and Douglas McWilliams have been working to try to establish the cost to the UK of EU reset. We estimate that long run it will reduce GDP by £73 billion. Just after a budget including stealth taxes and a rise in the minimum wage reducing GDP by £33 billion in total. For details see: growth-commission.com/2026/1…

Andy Burnham is currently engaged in the long, slow process of taking Britain back into the European Union The draft went round the 27 member states today. Under the food deal he means to sign in Brussels on November 20th: - The EU's rules on food safety and on animal and plant health become British law automatically, through a European Partnerships Bill written for the purpose. - When Brussels changes its rules, our law changes with them, and when there's an argument over what a rule means, the EU's own court settles it. - Britain pays "an appropriate financial contribution" towards the system, a figure nobody has yet been told - And European boats keep their access to our waters until 2038, as agreed last year. In return we get...very little. And what we especially do not get is any vote on any of it and no seat in the room where it's written. Annd that's just your first course. The rest of the summit menu links our carbon market to theirs and adds a youth scheme the EU wants set at 100,000 people a year or more. The government values the deal about £5bn a year, a little under 0.2% of the economy. There's craftsmanship in their shystery. We'll have membership re-brokered in pieces small enough that the controversy they rouse will be, initially, minimal. Burnham says his red lines on the single market, the customs union and free movement hold "for the duration of this Parliament", which is an oddly precise shelf life for a principle. He wants to "explore options" once the summit is over. But he also says he hopes to see Britain rejoin in his lifetime. Downing Street says that on free movement he is "not leaning either way". He is taking us back in with a member's obligations and absolutely no voice. It's an extension of the spirited of wicked, self-hating animus that drove SW1 to try to scupper Britain's original post-Brexit deals (and the result itself) as a method of what they considered appropriate vengeance on the electorate who robbed them of their status symbol. Progress would diverge from EU rules wherever doing so makes British food and goods cheaper or better, and replace alignment with mutual recognition deals with the US, India, Japan and the Gulf that leave our law in Parliament's hands. We'd cut the cost at our own border with risk-based checks on no more than 5% of food consignments from trusted partners.